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A Habitable Planet Orbiting Nearest Star Proxima Centauri Found

Scientists discover Earth-like planet Proxima b :Does the nearest star to our solar system host worlds of its own? 2016 could be the year we find out, as the nearby red dwarf star Proxima Centauri gets scrutinized by astronomers in unprecedented detail using a variety of search methods.

One of the most exciting is the Pale Red Dot initiative. Led by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) scientists, Pale Red Dot is a public campaign to examine Proxima Centauri for exoplanets using the radial velocity method, which looks to tease out the signal of an orbiting planet tugging on its host star. 51 Pegasi – the first exoplanet discovered orbiting a Sun-like star in 1995 – was discovered using this method, and hundreds of discoveries that followed.